


Susatchka

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [100]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon Compliant, Canon Jewish Characters, Canon Russian Characters, Childhood Trauma, Earth-Minbari War, EarthForce, Family, Fix-It, Gen, Guilt, Hate has to be carefully taught, Hospitals, How canon misled you, Illness, POV Child, Parent-Child Relationship, Parental Death, Psi Corps, Sad, Secrets, Self-Fear, Self-Hatred, Sleepers, Slice of Life, Suicide, War, Worldbuilding, scapegoating, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-05 10:56:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14042739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Maybe there's a few things Ivanova's father never told her.





	Susatchka

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue of _Behind the Gloves_ is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10153487) \- please read!
> 
> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

          "Let me tell you a story. It's about a woman who fell in love, got married, had children. One problem: She's a telepath. She kept it from Psi Corps till she's 35. By then, she had two kids. The Corps told her to come with them or go to prison. But she loved her family and she refused to leave them. There was only one way they would let her stay. Every week, for 10 years, they injected her with drugs to suppress her telepathy. Every day she died a little, until she finally ended it by taking her own life." - Susan Ivanova, _Legacies_

          "You know, when I first came to Babylon 5, I studied your record. Terrible pity about your mother. But she took her own life. It wasn't the Corps that did it." - Bester, _Ship of Tears_

I've now [cleaned up the timeline of events](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14055426) leading to the death of Ivanova's mom, explained more about [what it means to be a latent telepath](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14065014), and compiled literally [everything canon tells us about sleepers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14056377). But what we still lack is an explanation for Ivanova's singular and passionate hatred for the Corps. And we also lack an explanation for her belief that her mother had to take sleeper drugs in order to stay with her family, when there is no law or regulation cited or shown anywhere in canon to support that belief.

So a different sort of explanation is needed.

In _Soul Hunter_ , Ivanova has the following conversation with her father via comm channel, as he lies dying in the hospital:

          "He's come out of the coma, but his condition's much worse. You only have a few minutes, at best."

          "l understand. Father?"

          "Is that you, Susan?"

          "Yes."

          "Dear God, I never thought that I'd see your face again. It makes this easier. Susan... I know I haven't been the best of fathers to you. But when your mother... passed on and your brother was killed in the war... I was too wrapped up in my own grief to pay attention to your needs. And when you joined Earthforce against my wishes-"

          "You don't have to say this."

          "Yes, I must. There's no more time. I want you to know... how proud I am of you, Susan. I always have been. But a father should give his daughter love... as well as respect, and in that, I failed you. I'm sorry. I'm ashamed. Forgive me."

          "Thank you."

          "Dushenka moya."

          "'Little soul.' You haven't called me that since l was... Papa?"

We know that Sophie died in 2246 (when Susan was 16), that Ganya was killed in action soon after, and that Susan enlisted in EarthForce soon after that (in 2247, when she turned 17, which is the age of enlistment). It's not hard to see how, after losing his wife to suicide and his son in combat, Andrei Ivanov would be opposed to his daughter enlisting - yes, after the war, but she would putting her own life on the line now, too, and leaving home for space, leaving him all alone back on Earth. (And it seems she didn't make much time for him in the years in between her leaving home and the show, either.)

He also knows he "hasn't been the best of fathers" to her. I am going to speculate there's more here than we're seeing on screen. I think he has more to apologize for than not being there for her, and for being too wrapped up in his grief to pay attention to her needs when her mother and brother died.

I think what feels sorry for goes back much farther than that. I think he feels guilty for contributing to - if not causing - the problem, even if he still can't entirely admit it.

Imagine this. Ivanova's mother grew up in a remote, rural place (or places), so she was never discovered in tests in school, and she encountered no other telepaths who might notice her and potentially call the Corps. Only one in a thousand in the general population has a rating - and that number is for the _whole population_ , so it includes both telepath communities (that tend to be insular, and concentrated in major cities), as well as towns where there are no (or extremely few) telepaths. If she was never tested (and it seems she wasn't), it's possible she's _never even met another telepath in her life, ever_.

God knows what the people in her community taught her about the Corps.

And she was on the weak end ([probably under P5](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10978596)), and untrained.

Then she moves to the city and marries Andrei Ivanov, and he's on-board with keeping her secret - he just doesn't want his family mixed up in any of "that kind of stuff." Again, God knows what he believes about the Corps, but let's say it's _really bad_. Let's also assume, not unreasonably, that there's _a lot_ of stigma against telepaths in their community.

When Susan is six and Ganya is about eight, the Corps finds out about Sophie. Susan and Ganya are both too young to understand what's going on, so what they know about what happened at that point comes solely from what their parents told them later.

I'm going to assume that the Corps did their job properly, and explained the laws to the parents. I'm also going to assume they did their job properly and explained the risks posed by the drugs, at least insofar as they are legally allowed to.

Sophie, frightened, considers joining the Corps.

Andrei is also frightened. He doesn't believe the Corps when they explain the risks of the drugs - he thinks this is some ploy to get her to join them. He's paranoid of the government interfering in the life of his family, keeping them on some lists, restricting their activities, and monitoring them. Remember, they're not only Russians, they're Russian Jews.

And he also knows there is tremendous stigma against telepaths. (Both he and Sophie harbor such attitudes themselves.)

Andrei tells Sophie that he will not live openly married to a telepath, and he will not let his children grow up with a mother in the Corps. He tells her that if she joins the Corps, he will take the children and leave her, and she will never see them again. Sophie relents. She agrees to his plan.

They hope that Sophie going on sleepers will allow the family to maintain the appearance (and lie) that their family is "normal," and thus keep the stigma from the children.

_Tell no one._

Susan and Ganya are told that Sophie must take the drugs, or go to prison. They are not even told there was another option - that she could have stayed with her family, healthy. The children are told that this is being done to their family by those "bad telepaths," who come to the house in gray suits, who wear black gloves and psi insignia badges. It's all their fault.

As a little tiny kid, Susan knows she can sometimes feel her mom's emotions, and can sometimes feel her mom's mind - and she knows that at least once, she made contact with her on her own. But she's six, so she understands very little, and all she learns from this is terrible fear that what happened to her mom will happen to her, that the scary men in gray suits and black gloves will come for her, too. And every week, when they come, she runs and hides.

_Tell no one - or some day, they'll come for you, too._

Most kids hate shots as it is. That's bad enough, but she also sees her mom get sick (and can't talk to any of her friends about why), and she watches her mother decline, and all along she's getting filled with more and more fear (for herself), rage and hate. She had a mom, and these bad people took her away, something she can never, never forgive, for as long as she lives.

And then to everyone's shock, Sophie commits suicide, likely from a combination of the depression brought on by the drugs, and the stigma brought on from being a telepath in that society.

Susan blames the Corps, because that's who she's always blamed. Andrei blames the Corps because he can't face his own guilt in contributing to her death.

He never believed that what the Corps reps had said could be true, that the drugs really could lead to this. He'd thought they were lying, because they were in the Corps. Or even if they were telling the truth, that the Corps must somehow be responsible anyway - they must have made the drugs that way as some sort of punishment for those who won't join the Corps, like going to prison. They did it. Somehow. BECAUSE IT HAD TO BE THEIR FAULT.

Everyone hates telepaths, right? Well, here's another reason: if you don't join their cult, they kill or imprison you.

Then Ganya is killed in the war, and Susan wants to enlist, and Andrei is furious, because she's the only family he has left, but she is hot-headed and leaves home and enlists anyway. And that opens the rift between Susan and her father.

It's only at the very end of his life that Andrei looks back and see how he failed as a father. He knows that had he not insisted Sophie take the drugs, had he not given her an ultimatum and threatened to take the children away, she would still be alive, and healthy. He knows he and Sophie lied to the children and let them believe the Corps would come and take Sophie away if she didn't take the drugs.

But he doesn't think he'll get a chance to see Susan again, because she's far out in space and not actually talking to him other than in occasional short messages with pleasantries and small talk. Their relationship is cold and strained. When he falls ill, she doesn't come back to Earth to see him. She's too self-absorbed, angry at him, and in denial about the severity of his illness to deal with it.

Thus he is shocked when he comes out of his coma - briefly - and she's on the comm channel. He tries to tell her he's sorry for how he failed her, and that he's proud of her, but he only has a minute or two before he lapses back into a coma, and never comes out.

He never tells her his own role in her mother's death. She's left trying to deal with her own complex feelings about the strained relationship she had with her father, and not knowing how to mourn him, but her murderous hatred for telepaths is never dimmed.

She can rationalize her brother's death - he died honorably in battle, defending humanity. She can forgive the aliens that tried to wipe out the human race, even though they killed him. But she can never forgive the Corps, for what (she believes) they did to her mother.


End file.
